The Pearmongress

As I wandered, unsure of where I was going or whence I came, I was struck by the stillness of the meadow. No wind tousled the long grass, no birds tweeted among the trees. My legs carried me forward, on through that lifeless, green garden, trackless in time and place. Sunlight filtered wan and dusty through the branches, but still it seemed to me a lightless forest.

Before long, I came upon a great, white-leafed tree reaching high from a small hill in a clearing.

A kind of whistle wafted windlessly to me from that tree, borne upon the breath of many sighs. It seemed to speak to me in lamentation, pining impotently for the memory of forgotten days, even as it shaped no words. Its pain was distantly familiar to me, though I couldn’t place the source.

I stepped under the shadow of its great boughs and counted among its branches beautiful, dangling fruit folded among silvery leaves. They shook and swayed on no breeze, possessed of some life beyond their nature. Trembling and murmuring each to another, they told of their fear and wonder only but to themselves.

“It is a pear tree,” came a voice.

I turned suddenly to find an old lady standing at my arm. She was shawled in black, an empty basket hung on the crook of her elbow.

“Surely you have heard of pears?”

“I believe I have…”

She clicked her tongue and smiled. “Of course you have, my dear. For you are come to the pearmongress, are you not? Come.” She held her hand in the direction of a small, sheet-covered lean-to under the shelter of two unmoving trees.

“Pardon me, but I don’t seem to remember anything…”

“I should think not. Tea?”

I gaped at her nonchalance before nodding timidly. “Yes, I suppose. Thank you.”

A hot cup of tea did sound rather lovely.

She ushered me to a small table under the awning of her home, seating me at its head. But in my bleariness, I could have sworn I had been sitting there all along.

“If it isn’t rude to ask, who are you?”

At that moment, she offered me a tiny, buttered roll on a plate. I don’t know where she got it from, but she seemed to me like a kindly grandmother offering her last ration for the company. Her eyes were on me as I lifted it to my mouth.

She smiled; it was a smile that drew her sharp, bronze cheeks up into her dark eyes.

“As I said, I am the pearmongress.”

“You sell pears?”

“In a manner of speaking…”

“Then perhaps you know this place - perhaps you could help me? I am hopelessly lost, and I can’t quite remember where I’ve been or where I go. It would help me to know more abou…” my words grew difficult through a mouth full of bread. There was no need or desire for eating, and yet I surprised myself with my greed as I tore more from the roll without swallowing.

“I cannot help you,” she said simply. “At least not in deciding where you go.”

My next words came muffled, incoherent behind my gorging of bread.

But she seemed to understand: Why are you here?

“I am one who reckons with the smallnesses of the world: with salt and with bone, with water and with blood. But I am also what lies beyond the great light you have always sought—”

My eyes raised at the old woman, as if to say: Light?

“Oh, yes; you once chased eternity, but instead have found it shrieking upon you.” Chuckling, she added, “But what else is there, little thing?”

The bread turned ash in my mouth. I laid it on my plate to find it to be little more than a rind of hard, black crust.

My eyes swung to her. With a hard swallow, I cleared my voice but could not give it courage:

“What are you?”

She was suddenly kneading clay under her spindly fingers, as naturally as a potter at the wheel. With a voice like a run of gravel, she said: “That is a big question, little thing, and with no small answer.”

“Please, tell me.”

“What can be said of this? I am the midpoint: a midwife, but I am no middle way. I am the fixed absolute at the end of all possibility. You are changed, and I am the change; you are ended and I am the beginning. I am your friend and your terror, and so you must love me even as I hate you. For you see, I am the key to this aimless puzzle, and you are… small. Powerless. Shallow. Well-known but insignificant. But I,” she said, leaning in, “I am unfathomable. And… I deal in pears.”

My tongue rolled over the soot in my mouth. I looked at the old woman, at the lank, silver hair that hung under her black head-covering, at the jagged teeth set in a curling mouth. She had a face: an identity.

I was puzzled. My fingers touched my own cheeks.

“Who am I?”

The question hadn’t occurred to me until just then.

She laughed a mocking laugh and was suddenly smoking a pipe of finger-bone. “Do you know how many have longed to know the answer to just such a question?”

“I must know. It could give me an answer to why I’m here, or even to where I’m meant to go.”

Her eyes, sharp windows into darkness, bore down on me as another set of arms produced a slanted basket of golden-brown pears from under the table. She plucked one from the top, and somehow I knew it to have once been mine.

But I don’t know how it came to be in her basket.

“Many pass by the home of the pearmongress,” she began, drawing a thin knife from her apron with one of many hands. “But few understand why.”

I watched her intently as she pressed the knife to the flesh of the pear. It seemed to quiver at the cold steel, and to my horror, red blood beaded at the incision.

“What are you doing—”

“You think yourself special,” she said, cutting deep into the fruit, never taking her eyes off me, “That your life is somehow set apart from all others.”

Blood flowed freely from the wound in the pear, and with long, yellow nails, she drove her thumbs into it with a snapping of flesh. Burrowing deep with a sickening squelch, she picked out a small, white thing: a tooth.

It clacked against the wood of the table.

“This is you, little thing: small. Meaningless.”

I took it into my fingers to feel its realness. The blood was dried like a film of honey over dead flesh.

I blinked, and suddenly that bloody tooth was a thin seed slippery with juice.

My eyes met hers.

“So you turn to other things to give your life meaning. Money, fame, power; sex, love, gratification. Fine things, finer things; how you long for the alchemy of gold from lead! But how much more you would envy the stars above to know that in their forge, gold is oil for the lamp of worlds. What singing there is among stars! What wonder to merely lift the eyes! Instead, you wallow in the mud of life, inventing your gods and spirits, imagining something bigger than all the world could care for you.” She cackled at this. “I do not.”

I panicked as realization set in.

Throat tightening, I whispered: “I just want to go back. Can I go back?”

“You cannot,” she said emptily, drawing a deep pull on her finger-bone pipe. “Not by any power you possess.”

“If you willed it, could you send me back?”

It could be said here that I surprised the pearmongress with my question. Her eyebrows arched with the crooked smile across her face. Smoke from the finger-bone blew from her nostrils.

“It is not beyond my skill to do. But why should I? As with all things, I own you. This was inevitable.”

“If it is inevitable, grant me more time to live my life. You will have me in the end.”

“Your life?” she chuckled. “Little thing, do you even remember your life?”

I frowned. I looked at my hands: they were a foreign paleness to my eyes, crossed over with lines I had never known.

“Go on, then. Surprise me. I will give you all that you once had if you can simply remember it.”

I thought hard. I racked my brain, I set my head in my hands.

Faint echoes of color flashed in the darkness of my eyelids. Voices, distant as the murmuring of the pear tree, played just beyond hearing. Skin, laughter, blood, wine, tears.

A rustle of brown cloth.

A wink of the sun at the wrong angle.

A crystal cup which held the light in its facets.

“I… remember milk.”

The pearmongress laughed again. “And I suppose you think that sets you apart from all the others who come to this place? Is it that you believe you had milk on a Tuesday in the year 1823 and no other did? What futility. Give up, little thing; your chase is over.”

And she stabbed the knife into the table and rose from her seat, six arms fanning from her shape. She seemed to me no longer to be the loving grandmother, but her very inverse. As I gazed into her eyes, a horror grew in me to know that I looked upon the end of all things.

“I will give you one last chance at life,” she said, her voice a synthesis of many voices. She held aloft the claywork she was kneading earlier, smoothened over the top. “Under this tablet I have scriven your name; what is it? Guess rightly and I will return you to your life of old.”

My heart sank.

I fell forward, bracing my arms against the table.

The mess of a pear was there, just under me. It whispered faintly to me. It seemed to writhe; the seeds of its body wriggled from their place like black maggots.

Blood sang in my ears.

“I… do not know.”

“Is this your answer?”

I heaved a shuddering sigh, fighting back tears. “My name was… Sarah.”

The pearmongress dropped the tablet upon the table. It split down the middle, but in deep letters was spelled the name:

RUE

“A pity,” she said. “You were so promising.”

With a flutter, the pearmongress was gone, and the lean-to of her house was grey and uninhabited. I turned behind me to find the pear tree still sitting upon its hill.

But from its branches issued a sound like the weeping of many people.